He’s a fall guy, and it has a lot to do with football

We have fallen into fellowship here in Los Angeles, the land of balance and tranquillity.

It’s a tailgate party, our first of the season. If there were ever a time for fellowship, for mirth and minor misbehavior, it is now. I mean, what are you going to do, wait forever?

To me, fall arrives like a letter from a great American writer — James Thurber, perhaps, or Thornton Wilder. Autumn. Autumnal. They might be my two favorite words.

Though the season of change, autumn is rife with comforting traditions ... the schools we love, the thumpy songs, the sweaters, pumpkin spice and everything nice.

Honestly, I’m not even sure pumpkin spice involves any pumpkin at all — it tastes like a chemical goo you might use to mend a broken vase. But its very appearance on menu boards is a bugle call for autumn.

In L.A., fall means the harvest is in, and the cellar is full of root vegetables to get us through the harshest winter months. Such a sense of relief sweeps over the place that we gather in ancient stadiums to try to roar our demons away. Just like the Pilgrims.

I can only imagine what this must look like from very high altitudes — the bonfires, the RVs, the things we kill and grill. In the end, college fans are probably the main reason we haven’t been invaded by extraterrestrials.

That alone is reason to cheer.

Look, L.A. is my latest crush. I was all but ready to abandon this failing Istanbul, but lately it’s been growing on me in incremental ways. Here, the trees don’t really turn (most are dead already). But the residents turn. If you never saw a calendar, you would know it’s autumn just by the way the populace turns cardinal or blue.

It’s a faith-based system really. Only one team will triumph, yet there are dozens of fan bases that still think they will. It engenders a “Lord of the Flies” vibe, and sometimes I am disgusted by it.

Well, so disgusted that I am celebrating at the Rose Bowl, with all the other moral relativists. What else are you going to do, sit home and watch your 401(k) slide? At least they have bratwurst here. And someone might’ve brought a beer. As my buddy Bob calls it, the Rose Bowl really is “America’s Stadium.”

We are only as strong as our biggest fear, and mine lately is to be cornered at some social event such as this by a Trump supporter ticking off the reasons why I should really pay attention.

Trump, who seems to me like a howling monk from the Middle Ages, has tapped into some vein. Maybe his supporters are drawn to his American fearlessness, the very trait we celebrate in those stadiums.

In any case, I’m here to avoid politics, not debate it. There is still plenty of time for that. In a year, we’ll still be arguing over Hillary’s emails and our role in Syria.

For now, there is football: the great American blast time.

Here at the Rose Bowl, I am surrounded by world-beaters — the millennials wearing sky blue shirts (for the record, Pantone 285) and unwarranted confidence, topped by a wet varnish of beer sweat.

It is always too hot here in the fall; September is the worst, followed by October, cooked medium well. To keep their fluids up, I pour beverages for my friends, and grill the brats, and ref their children’s silly party games. Seriously, monkeys on mopeds could not be more entertaining.

Kids, let me talk for a minute on the disturbing consequences of minor misbehavior: There is a football stuck in an oak tree, so some of you little Einsteins are hurling a golf rake at it like a spear. Fore!

No good can come of this. Like most college football behavior, it seems tribal. Not tribal in the good way either. Tribal in the sense of human sacrifice and burning flesh.

Yet, life is a series of crud that needs to be addressed. I guess the stuck football is that, a symbol of the little troubles that we somehow handle. Every tailgate, someone lodges a football in a tree, and then several of the young adults spend half an hour devising murderous ways to get it down.

Maybe this is what really keeps the extraterrestrials at bay ... the mirth, the misbehavior, the millennials, the Trumps.

Or perhaps it’s me, snapping a pair of barbecue tongs over a wobbly $10 grill, then resorting to turning the burning brats with my bare fingers...ouch.

That would scare me off too.

chris.erskine@latimes.com

Twitter: @erskinetimes